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Friday, August 22, 2014

Making Presentations with Latex

When preparing documents such as research papers, reports, thesis works and even for preparing my CV, I use Latex. However until recently, I didn't use Latex for preparing presentations. I was relying on open source presentation programs such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice when preparing some slides. Finally, I got a chance to explore presentation slide preparation using Latex.

What we need first of all is complete package of Latex for GNU/Linux. I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 and I installed Latex complete package using the following command.

sudo apt-get install texlive-full

It may take a long time to complete the installation since there will be lot of packages installing with huge sizes. After the installation completed, we can move onto try some Latex script. Create a directory called 'Presentation' and save the following content inside that directory as 'slides.tex'. It just contain the minimum things we need in presentation slides. You will note that we are using a document class called beamer.

\documentclass{beamer}\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}\usetheme{Warsaw}\title{This is the title of the paper}\subtitle{here is the subtitle}\author{Author Name}\institute{Institutions Name, Address.}\date{August 22, 2014}\begin{document}\begin{frame}\titlepage\end{frame}\begin{frame}{First Slide}
A sample page
\end{frame}\begin{frame}{Second Slide}
Here is a list of some items.
\begin{itemize}\item my first list item
\item this is the second item
\item we can have many more
\end{itemize}\end{frame}\end{document}

From the terminal, move into this newly created directory and issue the following command sequence, one after the other, to generate our slides in PDF format and view it.

latex slides.tex

dvipdf slides.dvi

evince slides.pdf &

We can extend this basic structure of the latex presentation into any type of complex presentation using tables figure and many other things just like we make them in other Latex documents.